I'm a Ph.D. student at the University of Missouri/Missouri School of Journalism. From July 2011 to July 2013, I was the Knight visiting editor/visiting assistant professor at the Missouri School of Journalism and Columbia Missourian. I studied entrepreneurial journalism, globalization and digital media to earn a graduate certificate from MU's Center for the Digital Globe. I have a master's degree in mass communications and a bachelor's degree in journalism from San Jose State University. I had a long career as a writer and editor for online and print media specializing in technology, business and local news. I've worked for the San Jose Mercury News, The Seattle Times, Puget Sound Business Journal and Los Angeles Daily News. On this blog, you'll find writing about academic and other topics.

Sunday, May 19, 2013

Storytelling in the Digital Age: ‘Being There’ with Kapuściński and Herodotus

In Travels with Herodotus, Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński alternated between two compelling narratives—passages from Herodotus’ The Histories, culminating with the tragic conflict between the Persians and the Greeks, and his own travels as a foreign correspondent in India, China, and countries in Africa.

Although separated by many centuries, Kapuściński and Herodotus used journalistic approaches to crafting narrative text. Their stories took on a dramatic, cinematic quality. Kapuściński discovered a world beyond Poland in the Cold War era. Herodotus documented an epic tragedy that ended with the downfall of a great ancient empire.

In both narratives, readers discover new worlds through the eyes of Kapuściński and Herodotus. For this reader, Travels with Herodotus benefited from the use of two screens. The book itself was read on a tablet computer with Amazon.com’s Kindle software, while a laptop was used to search on the Internet for characters in Herodotus’ Histories and for the settings of Kapuściński’s travels.

In a digital age, narrative text still can be a compelling storytelling choice. However, today’s journalists can choose among—or combine—numerous other storytelling tools. This essay examines five media tools that could enhance the story for a journalist retracing the two writers’ travels: film, personal narratives, interactive maps, social media, and blended multimedia.

Storytellers must be aware of the challenges for the reader (or listener or viewer) to move from a condition of “getting there,” where thinking about how a medium is used might be a barrier to understanding, to “being there” (Wise et al., 2009). “Being there” through media is no substitute for physically being there with Kapuściński and Herodotus. However, because in the human brain we don’t distinguish between messages received through in-person and mediated communication (Lang, 2009), an effective narrative can create its own version of reality, or “being there,” for the reader.

Film

With their epic scope, the stories of Kapuściński and Herodotus easily could be told in film (or video). As Bilandzic and Busselle (2011) noted, film allows the viewer to construct a model of a self-contained world. This is especially effective when filmmakers provide a perspective (for example, that of a character such as Kapuściński or Herodotus) for a story, take viewers on a journey through that constructed world, and provide a sense of “telepresence” that replaces the distractions of the actual world with a perceived reality of the film (Bilandzic & Busselle, 2011).

As one example, the Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire (2008) immersed its audience “in the contradictions of a megacity” (Krstic, 2011). The film was criticized for not accurately representing the hardship of poverty in Mumbai. However, adhering more to the conventions of a Bollywood gangster movie, director Danny Boyle created a consistent alternate reality for the viewer, Krstic contended.

Although Kapuściński and Herodotus described a world based on real events, their stories were told from individual perspectives. Because both writers’ stories were from the past, the reality they described no longer exists. Film, however, could be used to create a substitute reality that would help an audience better understand their worlds.

Personal narratives

Although written text and video are effective storytelling tools, producers of programs such as Ira Glass’ This American Life have discovered that public radio listeners love to connect with audio recordings of people telling their own personal narratives (Butler, 2006). People are often eager to tell their stories.

Butler offered the example of StoryCorps, which set up recording booths at Grand Central Station and at Ground Zero in New York and took a mobile recording booth to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, with the possibility that individuals’ stories would be heard on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition. “The larger context of the personal-narrative renaissance has to do with the democratization of news-bringing,” Butler wrote, “and the fact that perhaps right now we are remembering something that we have always known: good raconteurs are everywhere” (p. 32).

New technology has made recording audio simpler than ever (Butler, 2006). It would be easy to imagine a journalist retracing the stories of Kapuscinski and Herodotus as a personal narrative.

Interactive maps

The stories in Travels with Herodotus occurred in locations that might not be familiar to readers. Interactive maps could help the audience better understand the significance of these locations.

In recent years, journalists have been considering how maps and other interactive graphics could be used better as storytelling tools. For example, Davidson (2009) envisioned an “economic weather map” for NPR’s Planet Money website that would help readers determine how the financial crisis was affecting people like them in different parts of the country and allow contributors to offer their own stories about the downturn.

In a non-fictional example, Shirky (2013) described how the Homicide Watch website has used an interactive map as a starting point to tell the stories of murder suspects and victims in Washington, D.C.

Interactive graphics can be challenging for journalists in traditional newsrooms (George-Palilonis & Spillman, 2013). Although journalists are excited about the possibilities of interactive graphics, it can be time-consuming to do them correctly. Producing interactive graphics requires software skills beyond those of a print graphic artist. In some newsrooms, editors question whether the payoff in page views is worth the time and effort. However, in such newsrooms as The New York Times and St. Louis Post-Dispatch, editors value interactive graphics as an effective storytelling tool (George-Palilonis & Spillman, 2013).

Social media

A journalist in 2013 traveling in the footsteps of Kapuściński or Herodotus might track his journey on social media such as Facebook or Twitter. In the past decade, these sites have changed the way we communicate with each other.

For that matter, social media were used to organize protests that led to the downfall of regimes in Tunisia and Egypt. Halverson, Ruston, and Trethewey (2013) cautioned against giving too much credit to social media for the Arab Spring and not enough to the sacrifices of protesters who died “carrying out individual acts of defiance” (p. 313) in those countries. However, they noted that social media were an effective tool for telling those protesters’ stories.

“The primary method by which their stories spread was through social and electronic media,” they wrote, “assuming the form of virtual reliquaries or electronic sites of encounter with the martyrs’ stories and iconography, providing an opportunity for personal connection” (p. 313, emphasis in the original). For example, Google executive Wael Ghonim created a Facebook page called “We are all Khaled Saeed,” named for a 28-year-old who was fatally beaten by police (Halverson, Ruston, & Trethewey, 2013).

Blended multimedia

The Internet allows storytellers to combine the strengths of different kinds of media. Online journalists can use written text, audio, and video. In addition, the Internet—unlike print, radio, and television—can be interactive in a way that allows for non-linear storytelling. According to Wise et al. (2009), combining narrative text with video can provide information about a news event while drawing “an individual into the story, in essence, moving the audience into ‘being there’ ” (p. 535).

Online examples such as The New York Times’ “Snow fall: the avalanche at Tunnel Creek” (Branch, 2012) and The Kansas City Star’s“Beef’s raw edges” (McGraw, 2012) demonstrate the power of combining text with multimedia elements such as video, audio, and interactive maps at exactly the point in a story where they are relevant to the narrative.

Conclusion

A retracing of Travels with Herodotus with today’s digital storytelling tools would use different kinds of media to enhance readers’ understanding of the authors’ stories. Media cannot substitute for experiencing a place or culture in person. However, blended multimedia with video, audio, and interactive graphics put directly in the most meaningful points in a narrative text could bring readers closer to “being there” with Kapuściński or Herodotus.